About

I joined Kingston University as Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies in 2014. I am normally module leader for two new undergraduate courses: How to Change the World (L5) and War and Society (L6). In 2018-9 I have a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

I began my working life as a journalist and photographer at Searchlight, the anti-fascist magazine founded in the 1970s. After that I worked intermittently as a freelance writer, with a spell as researcher for a feminist NGO specialising in the design of the built environment.

Following the publication of my book Beyond the Pale (1991) I taught at the School of Humanities in University of Greenwich (1992-9) where I discovered the joys of cultural geography. Then I moved to the US where I taught sociology/women's and gender studies at Yale University (1999-2005). From 2007-2014 I worked as a research fellow at the Open University.

Courses taught

Undergraduate

Qualifications

1998 Ph.D (Cantab) Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (S.P.S.), University of Cambridge

Research

My first book (Beyond the Pale, 1992/2015) focused on the discursive production of 'whiteness' through a gendered reading of colonial history. It was subsequently instrumental in shaping a new international field that has become known as Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS). Since then I have continued to explore the ways in which a focus on 'whiteness' provides a means to analyse, document and resist structures of racial oppression in the UK and beyond. My work is rooted in a multi-disciplinary approach formed within the context of transnational gender studies.

Within the last ten years my research has explored the effects of permanent war 'at home'. My most recent book Military Migrants (2012) addressed the relationship between racism and militarism in the contemporary postcolonial context. Today my work engages more explicitly with initiatives in peace studies that bring together a concern with militarisation, climate change, social injustice, environmental degradation and other root causes of global conflict.

From September 2018 I have a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on a long-term ethnographic project called 'One Village, One World'. This explores dominant notions of 'the rural', and its attendant associations with 'the countryside', terms that automatically evoke the idea that rural England is in a perpetual stage of loss due to forces such as immigration and globalisation.

I am also engaged in a two-year study of an army town in Wiltshire, entitled 'The Military in our Midst', which is also funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2018-2020). The team consists of Professor Paul Dixon (Co-I); Dr. Antonia Dawes, and one other RA; together we hope to reveal the effects of significant policy changes aimed at re-organising the relationship between military and civilian communities as a result of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.